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This is a story about an architect, a newspaperman and an art history professor, and it starts with a speech.
One night in the 1970s, the professor, James Dennis, went to the Unitarian Meeting House in Madison to hear the newspaperman, Herb Jacobs, speak about what it was like to engage with genius, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. "He was superb," Dennis said of Jacobs, who spoke that night about having approached Wright in the 1930s, with the challenge of designing a home that could be built for $5,000. Wright did the design, and Herb and Katherine Jacobs built it, at 441 Toepfer Avenue in Madison. They lived in the house for five years before moving to the country in 1942.
Jacobs, a former Capital Times reporter, spoke of that and more in his talk at the Unitarian Meeting House. Afterward, Dennis had a minute with Jacobs, to say how much he enjoyed the presentation. Dennis had long been intrigued by the architect. Wright's fame was such that anyone even briefly in his orbit never forgot it.
Dennis, growing up in Ohio, had an aunt who told of having confronted Wright after a public appearance in which the architect dismissed historical houses. The aunt had a neo-colonial farmhouse.
Dennis saw Wright's contrariness first hand one night in the 1950s, at the Memorial Union. Dennis had just arrived...